Celebrations and Ferris Wheels

Lizzie got to play hooky from school today, spending a nice day home with me. In part we read portions of Graham’s newly released Circus Philosophicus. Graham opens the book by asking us to imagine a metaphysical ferris wheel that passes beneath the ground to a series of winding caverns below. The cars of the wheel carry all sorts of different objects, while there are other objects on the ground and in the caverns. As Graham remarks,

This image of a revolving wheel is a picture of our world. In it, the dramatic interplay of object and network becomes visible. Countless entities circle into and out of our lives, some of them threatening and others ludicrous. The objects in the cars and those on the ground or in the chambers affect one another, coupling and uncoupling from countless relations– seducing, ignoring, ruining, or liberating each other. This process is anything but a game: in it, our happiness and even physical safety are at stake. It would be easy to follow tradition and speak of a Wheel of Fortune. But in keeping with the metaphysical nature of this book, it is better to call it the Wheel of Events, the Wheel of Contexts, or the Wheel of Relations. As the ferris wheel circles, new and surprising events are summoned into existence. (4 – 5)

The ferris wheel is thus a sort of allegory for– among other things –how objects pass in and out of relations with one another. Lizzie was particularly taken with a passage about a celebration (she’s a big fan of parties). Graham writes,

Let’s develop an earlier example, and say that one of the underground chambers houses a union of steelworkers. As they await the appearance of their familiar grey flag with its black crescents and diamonds, the workers and the flag are two utterly separate realities. But once the banner moves into view, the room erupts in raucous celebration. Now, we cannot agree with the classical theory which holds that the piece of cloth is a substance and each of the workers also a substance but the celebration itself just an accidental intersection of two entities. For the celebration is no mere aggregate: instead, it is every bit as real as the physical piece of cloth or the human workers themselves. We admit that the celebration is unlikely to last for more than a few hours, while the flag and the workers may endure for decades to come. But this familiar criterion of durability is irrelevant to the metaphysical question of what can be regarded as a substance. [My emphasis] For as everyone knows who has taken part in especially intense gatherings, a celebration is a force to be reckoned with: a new entity to be taken into account by many other things. The workers may find themselves carried away by the mood of the party– a mood that exists somewhere beyond each of the individuals as a reservoir of surplus energy. Riot police may be summoned should the atmosphere deteriorate, and the celebration might resist police efforts to control it. Even the union flag that triggered the party will be affected by the celebration-entity of which it is a key component. For it may gain historic value from being the very flag that triggered this particular riot; it could become outlawed, and thereby attain wide popularity as a symbol of resistance. In addition, the flag can be physically altered by the smoky fumes or spray of champagne that the party unleashes. In short, the party seems to have all the features of a genuine entity. We cannot use physical duration as a standard of what is real and what is accidental. Chemists are aware of this fact, and feel no shame in using the same periodic table both for the artificial heavy elements that last for fractions of a second and for the hydrogen and helium that have endured since nearly the dawn of time. The difference between substance and accident is not decided by stopwatch or calandar. If we provisionally accept that reality equals resistance (an idea I reject for other reasons) then the steel-workers’ celebration is very much a substantial reality, as any riot officer will testify. (5 – 6)

I apologize for such a lengthy quotation, but this passage is just too lush and arresting to pass up. As I read Graham’s discussion of the celebration as an entity in its own right I’m forcefully brought home to the realization of just how far we have yet to go in thinking through the implications of OOO. Graham often speaks of the virtues of “weird realism”, and in the sheer pluralistic intoxication of Graham’s ontology we certainly encounter the strangest of realisms. This is a virtue, not a vice. We often speak of the subject and the object, yet paraphrasing James Bond, this world is not enough. Here the subject generally refers to the domain of humans, whereas the object refers to the domain of physical things.

Graham’s universe is a universe in which entities defy any neat categorization into the domains of “the subject” and “the object”. Rather, we get an entirely different understanding of objects, where objects can no longer be neatly reduced to physical things (where’s the solid clod that is a “celebration”) and where objects can no longer be treated as what is opposed to or stands opposite to a subject. Indeed, we’re no longer quite sure what constitutes a subject. Where before we thought we knew quite clearly what a subject is, now we find that we’re a bit puzzled. And if we are puzzled, then this is because relations are generative of a new, higher level, object.

If this is the case, then we are forced to substantially rethink, for starters, our ethical and political concepts. Hitherto, in the domain of ethics, we thought we knew what we were talking about when we talked about the good life, praise and blame, and ethical principles. We we thought we knew that we were talking about the actions of an individual person. Yet if Graham’s thesis is right, if it is true that relations are generative of higher level objects, we can no longer be quite sure. This entity composed of Levi+Computer is one entity. Levi apart from the computer is another entity. Levi with a gun or a knife is yet another entity. A couple is yet another entity. A girl and her dog or hawk is yet another entity. There are a plurality of ethical actors that differ from one another and that substantially change the nature of the ethical and political questions we ask. I’m not even sure where to begin in thinking these things, but I’m certainly very excited.

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

14 Responses to “Celebrations and Ferris Wheels”

The second link goes to Wikipedia, and I must say that Graham is one rather post prodigious and literally schizophrenic cat, far out. When does he sleep and how many times per second does he change personalities, do they all have different writing styles and argue constantly with each other on the talk pages?

One, this may be the most adorable post, ever. Two, Graham’s new book is almost unbearable philosophical enjoyment. Finally, three, your last paragraph, I can only say: yes, yes, yes — where is all this going to go? It is, as you say, very exciting.

I CANNOT WAIT for my copy to arrive. Incredibly exciting indeed–it’s evident just from the parts you quoted.

A quick thought from my own experience: my parents own a couple of restaurants in Saratoga Springs, NY, where I’ve waited tables on-and-off for years in between stints of academic labor at various institutions. In that time, I’ve noticed that there is an ineffable element to one’s particular interaction with a table full of customers that seems to surpass the particular combination of personalities, moods, and contingencies of service that bear upon the interaction… some element that is not reducible to any of these factors, but that has a general bearing on how they all come together, influencing the overall vibe of the experience (from highly pleasant to highly not) for everyone involved. It’s not that the describable variables play no role or admit of no predictive value–e.g. a table full of drunken yuppies who have just lost a lot of money gambling at the race track is never a welcome prospect–but these elements can’t account for the entirety of the experience. There is something more. You can’t put your finger on it, you can’t wrap your brain around it, but you can feel it operating in an indirect kind of way behind the phenomenal fabric of the exchange, sometimes from the second you walk up and introduce yourself to the table.

Since I’ve started teaching, I’ve noticed the same thing with classes–entire courses and individual sessions have a certain something to them that you can’t nail down, directly describe, or experience. But it’s there and you can feel its effects.

When I first read Mr. Harman’s Tool-Being I realized that in some parts of Ireland, in some zones of spacetime, faeries and goblins really do exist! A liberating realization, I assure you.

Now, I have also expended considerable energy studying Buddhist epistemology and psychology, i.e. analytic meditations on the nature of perception and representation. Buddhist scholars have said for centuries that the phenomena arise, endure, and recede based upon causes and conditions. What one entity experiences as a glass of water, another entity could perceive to be a glass of festering pus. The former entity would be refreshed, while the latter would be induced to vomit. Likewise, an enlightened sequence of experience would perceive the liquid not as water nor as pus, but as the nectar of immortality. In this last case, the liquid would produce a fine scent on the skin, a charisma unparalleled, and an electric presence that produces experiences of transformative insight in other beings.

What I find in Graham’s work is an approach to ontology that opens up world history to a more robust interaction with the future of philosophy. Heidegger’s great mistake from my reading is his persistent belief that the future of world history will be dominated by European thinking. Even when Heidegger clears a way for comparative philosophy, I can witness him continually clicking back into his Heidegger trance, into his childhood, into his upbringing, into his history.

Whereas, with Graham taking Heidegger’s tool analysis and opening these insights to a realm of events Heidegger’s trance can’t tangle, I finally have permission as a philosopher to acknowledge world history. Finally, I have the knowledge I need to communicate with the inhabitants of the past — with places and people, hobgoblins and ancestor spirits, deluded emotional projections and astral demigods.

As for the future of OOO, one of my hopes is that we might examine persistent categories of the supernormal and superman afresh. Now that the interiority of mankind has a foot in the door to the future, the philosophers have a chance to form new enclaves for experimentation with the creativity of EVENTS. If we can learn to play with history, we can produce the experience of a deep connection with the subterrenean and superluminal ingredients of happiness and rational analysis humans have often been said to live for.

We can make objects for children of all ages that will rocket launch humanity toward better cities, hipper courtyards, participatory art democracies, and a slew of aestheticized ordinaries.

Also, I cannot resist mentioning that Graham’s work holds promise for the future of psychiatry.

I have been fascinated with Richard Bandler and John Grinder’s Neuro-Linguistic Programming for a few years now. Bandler describes a case in a psych hospital through which he treated a patient who told himself and everyone around him he was Christ the Messiah. For years this man was treated pharmacologically and through various psychoanalytic techniques. Bandler walked into this man’s presence with a tool box, some long nails, and a few small pieces from a 2X4. He set the implements on the ground next to the door and walked up to the Messiah. He said to the man, “Are you Jesus the Christ?” The man replied, “I am, and you are my child.” Bandler asked again, “Are you completely sure that you are Jesus the Christ?” The man responded, “I am, may peace be upon you.” Bandler said, “Then I’ve come to the right place.” He then walked over to his tools and started building a crucifix on the wall of the psych hospital. Bandler of course was entirely in character. The man became slightly anxious and said, “What are you doing?” At that moment Bandler confronted the man, eye to eye and face to face, a mere inches from body to body:

“You know what I’m doing,” he said.

Bandler went on like this and sure enough the Messiah trance was lifted. The man started pleading with Bandler to reconsider. “I’m not Jesus! I’m not the Messiah!” The man was completely distraught, but made his first steps toward full recovery that day.

Bandler was asked what the hell he thought he was doing, and didn’t he worry that his intervention could induce the patient toward self-mutilation? He said, sometimes you have to inhabit the ontology of a patient and find an event you can exploit to induce changes in the behavioral repertoire of the patient. When you call their bluff in a controlled experiment that in their mind matches the severity of whatever traumas induced the psychosis originally, you produce a new fixation. If that new fixation has more metaphysical weight in their subjective representations than the previous traumas, they will form a new personality based not upon past traumas but upon the event of the controlled psychiatric intervention. This opens up a pathway for communication with psychiatric professionals, which opens up the possibility of transference and catharsis.

In my view Graham’s view opens up great creative leeway for psychiatric policy. It will take some time for psychiatric thinkers to play with Graham’s models, but if the history of Continental philosophy is any indication — and here I’m thinking of Guattari and D.W. Winnicot as examples — there should be some serious work along these lines in the next decade.

Cameron: “Now, I have also expended considerable energy studying Buddhist epistemology and psychology, i.e. analytic meditations on the nature of perception and representation. Buddhist scholars have said for centuries that the phenomena arise, endure, and recede based upon causes and conditions. What one entity experiences as a glass of water, another entity could perceive to be a glass of festering pus. The former entity would be refreshed, while the latter would be induced to vomit. Likewise, an enlightened sequence of experience would perceive the liquid not as water nor as pus, but as the nectar of immortality. In this last case, the liquid would produce a fine scent on the skin, a charisma unparalleled, and an electric presence that produces experiences of transformative insight in other beings.”

Yeah–that is a very good way of thinking about things from a certain Buddhist point of view.

Yes Tim, I agree. It gets even more interesting. For example, there are epistemic questions about certain sages who do not eat food or drink water at all for long stretches of time. Our OOO theorists are at this stage perhaps to incredulous to cope with investigating such epistemic issues from OOO perspectives. The sages might claim that the energy to sustain the life of an organism arises based upon causes and conditions. Eating certain foods and drinking certain liquids provides us with the sugars and amino acids we need to repair cells and excrete wastes. However, eating and drinking are not the only combination of necessary and sufficient conditions that provide the energy the organism requires. The claim coming from Buddhism, that only seems to come from Buddhism (which is one reason why Buddhism is important and is not exhausted by your opinion of its doctrines) is simply that a cultivated spiritual practice can, under certain circumstances, provide necessary and sufficient causes and conditions for the life-maintenance of a vibrant organism in the absence of food and drink. Such a practice likely entails physical techniques such as inner heat yoga, bandha (muscle) contractions, visualizations, vocal and subvocal projections, postures; also, cultivation of stillness, concentrated analytic meditation, and perhaps most importantly the crux phenomena known as “direct perception of emptiness”. An OOO, by opening itself to world history and the open question of the behavioral repertoire of the human species, might take interest in the techniques at work here.

From an Object Oriented Ontological view, we can examine, for example, an elderly “Tulku” whose students swear he hasn’t eaten or consumed any liquid for some number of years. If we view this entity as not being exhausted by his Buddhist linguistic framework, we might perhaps find ourselves asking this strange question ourselves: does this living organism actually have a capacity for such behaviors?

With OOO in view, we can dig into claims from Buddhism about supernormal behavior and the role of ‘diffusive interiority’ in producing such phenomena. We can combine questions we acquire from Buddhist thought to investigations into Neo-Darwinian Theory, Life History Theory, Evolutionary Developmental Psychology, and Epigenetics.

The reason Buddhism is important for the future of philosophy, in my opinion, is precisely that Buddhist thinking produces epistemic claims about the behavioral repertoire of the human organism. I applaud Levi Bryant for focusing on other contexts, non-human loci that influence philosophical thought about life in the world. I can’t wait to read his book! My own inclination is to focus on nearly-forgotten, under-encouraged investigations into the plasticity of the human life cycle.

Object Oriented Ontologies that focus on the human life cycle will be tremendously fruitful. We can survey the cutting edge of biotechnology, military and pharmacalogical R&D, and utilize what we find in an effort to re-open the case files of extraordinary human endeavor throughout world history. What we find I think will startle us.

(By the way, Douglas Hofstadter writes about the diffusive nature of interiority in I Am a Strange Loop.)